No going back on works, other ministries allocations’ cut –National Assembly

The National Assembly, on Thursday, insisted that it had the power to tamper with allocations in the budget.

It also maintained that the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), told Nigerians “half truths” on the financing status of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Second Niger Bridge.

Fashola had, last week, raised the alarm over the insertion of projects outside the purview of his ministry in the 2017 Appropriation Act by the National Assembly.

The minister said it was unfair to the executive arm of government for the inclusion of such projects after public hearings on the budget and defence of the fiscal estimates by the ministries.

The House of Representatives justified the National Assembly’s decision to slash the budget of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway from N31bn to N10bn and that of the 2nd Niger Bridge from N15bn to N10bn.

The Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Mr. Abdulrazak Namdas, disagreed with the minister that there was no existing Public Private Partnership funding agreement for the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

Namdas, in an interview with journalists in Abuja, alleged that the main cause of Fashola’s anger with the National Assembly was the decision of the legislature to remove the N20bn the minister proposed as “contingencies” in the 2017 budget.

The Rep, who is also a member of the House Committee on Works, told journalists that by the minister’s latest statement, the government was exploring the option of using a consortium of banks to raise an amount like “a loan.”

He stated, “So, even if he says there is no PPP, but there is something like a loan by a consortium of banks, what do you make of that?

“Since he is not sure, we stand on our ground that there is a PPP in place and that the National Assembly acted right by re-distributing the money to the roads in the country, including South-West states.”

In 2016 specifically, Namdas disclosed that the National Assembly appropriated N40bn for the road, out of which only N26bn was successfully utilised.

“The other N14bn was not released. It then means that even if we gave them the whole N31bn, there is no guarantee that they will release it. The National Assembly acted from a position of experience,” he added

On the 2nd Niger Bridge, Namdas said the reason the money was not released by the government was that the budget was passed late and signed “late” into law in May 2016.

He stated, “When we said the same money (N12bn) was returned in 2017, we were referring to the government’s excuse for not releasing the money in 2016.

“If in 2016, you said the budget was late in May, and you didn’t work with the money; this year’s budget was signed in June. This means that they will not use the money.

“There is an issue of capacity that we observed; that was why we took N5bn from the money and allocated it to other roads in the South-East, leaving N7bn.

Namdas said members were surprised that the ministry would keep N20bn in the budget as “contingencies”, but chose to propose only N12bn for the 2nd Niger Bridge.

“The provision for contingencies was found only in Fashola’s ministry and the fact that we removed that money is where the anger is. We sourced another N30bn and added that N21bn, bringing it to N50bn, which was distributed to 15 other roads in the country,” he added.

Namdas stated that so long as the executive did not acknowledge the role of the legislature as “having the power of appropriation in a democracy,” there would always be frictions between the two arms.

When asked what would be the way forward since the cuts in the votes of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the 2nd Niger Bridge had generated controversies, Namdas said the solution was to implement the budget as passed by the National Assembly.

He, however, said the only available window for a review would be by “virement.”

Namdas said, “Except they can come by way of virement, there is nothing else to be done. Even the 2016 budget, it was reviewed at some point. So, that virement option is there.”

Also, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Senator Aliyu Sabi-Abdullahi, who spoke to one of our correspondents on the telephone on Wednesday night, insisted that the legislators had constitutional backing on the upward review of the budget.

“Even as he (Fashola) is claiming that I was not at the meeting. I don’t have to be at the meeting; when my colleagues are there, they are there on behalf of all of us. We stand by our words and we still have a response to him,” Sabi-Abdullahi stated.

Although the Senate’s spokesman did not state when the lawmakers would respond to the minister’s criticism, there were indications that the issue might be raised in the upper chamber when they resume from recess on Tuesday next week.

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